If He Hears the Word
by 13pens
Summary: A dark exploration of Henry's relationship with Regina. Deviates from canon pre-1x01. [TW: implied abuse, rape]


**A/N:** I published this story to tumblr months ago, so it's not new.

**TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR: implied abuse/violence, rape**

* * *

Henry's 8th birthday was just a week ago, an event that met cakes, presents, many hugs and kisses from his mother, and the company of a few children who were likely frozen in time in their little bodies.

It was supposed to be something celebratory, good things were supposed to come with age. Not an appointment with Dr. Hopper. Not being lonely when he'd realized that these children wouldn't grow, and that when he advanced to the third grade, none of them would follow him. None of them would remember his name. He was never one of them, just a kid up a level. It happened every year. He was growing tired of it.

"How are you today, Henry?" Dr. Hopper asks, his face as friendly as it everyday—literally every day: it seems the man has no problems himself, no problems of his own. He is stuck, like Henry, in a routine, but the difference is that only one of them suspects something is wrong.

"I tried to say hi to Julie today," Henry says. "She didn't know who I was. Why do they do that, Dr. Hopper?" he pleads, hoping that this time he is given an answer. He's asked his mother many times before, why things the way they are, and she can never offer a reply satisfactory enough to quell his frustration.

"Why am I the only one that grows?"

Dr. Hopper tilts his head in a funny way, the way adults often do to Henry when he poses something they feel unorthodox. "You're not the only one that grows, Henry. Everyone grows."

"Not everyone."

"Of course they do," Dr. Hopper insists.

He is the same, and it stings his little heart. Henry never asks that question again and moves on to talk about how he's been having trouble in math.

* * *

"We built a birdhouse today," Henry tells Dr. Hopper as he has been for the past two years. They have made little progress, but Regina insists that Henry keeps going to these sessions. Dr. Hopper says it's because she's concerned for him, that she wants Henry to have someone to talk to.

Henry likes Dr. Hopper. But he doesn't see why he needs to talk to him all the time.

"Didn't you build one yesterday?" Dr. Hopper inquires, and Henry sighs.

"That's what I've been trying to tell you," he says with exasperation. "The same thing happens all the time. The only people who do different things are me and my mom, and she doesn't tell me why. She lies to me."

Dr. Hopper crosses his legs and pushes up his glasses, preparing to scribble something onto his clipboard. He's found something that he could ask Henry more extensively on apart from those questions that no one apparently knows the answer to.

"What does she lie to you about?"

"Things like, why I need to see you all the time."

"How do you feel when she lies to you?"

Henry sits and thinks for a moment, and the word comes to him simply. "It makes me feel angry."

"I see. What do you feel like doing when you're angry when she lies?"

"I'm not just angry when she lies," Henry finds himself saying. "I'm angry at her all the time."

* * *

When Ms. Blanchard gives him the book, it all makes sense, and Dr. Hopper is the first one he tells. He's the one that is paid to listen even if he doesn't want to, and that is close enough to a confidante for Henry.

"She's the Evil Queen," he explains with enthusiasm to a degree that Dr. Hopper has rarely seen, so he is sure to pay close attention.

"And why do you think so, Henry?"

"Doesn't it make sense? She's always mean to everyone in town, and the curse she cast—"

"The curse?"

"Yes, the curse she cast to get back at Snow White."

"And who do you think is Snow White?"

"Miss Blanchard—see, look," Henry holds out the book to Dr. Hopper. "She looks just like her. And the Evil Queen looks just like my mom."

"Henry," Dr. Hopper regrettably cuts into Henry's epiphany. "I know you're upset with your mother, but isn't saying this a bit extreme?"

Henry sits back and slumps his shoulders, swallowing the rest of his explanation, words dead in his throat.

Henry has no one. No matter what his mother says, that she loves him, he knows she's only pretending. If she loved him she'd let him stop going to see Archie. If she loved him, he wouldn't be in Storybrooke, Maine at all.

* * *

If he hears the word "crazy", he might hit someone, because that's how he feels. Crazy.

His mother comes to talk to Dr. Hopper privately after his session, but he can hear through the door. He doesn't tell her much, but advises that she pays closer to attention to Henry's feelings.

"I always pay attention," she bites at him in response to what she translates as an accusation. "I didn't hire you to counsel me in parenting, Doctor."

When she comes out of his office, she plasters on a smile, puts arm around Henry's shoulder but never her palm.

"What do you want for dinner tonight?" she asks him. "I'm planning on making turnovers for dessert. Doesn't that sound nice?"

She says she pays attention but she lies about that, too.

Something in Henry's stomach aches. In any other world, he would be happy. In any other world where mothers didn't lie to their children and dance around the sad and bitter implication that their sons were crazy, he'd be fine.

If he hears the word, he might hit someone. He might even hit her.

* * *

She cries in front of him for the first time.

He's lived twelve long years with her, and that's when he can no longer take it. That's when he sees her in her office, pulls out the book that Ms. Blanchard had given him (the same Ms. Blanchard that no longer knows him as a student, nor even a former student, but simply as the Mayor's kid) and places it in front of her. That's when he opens up the page where her pale sinister face is and points.

"I know what you did."

She tries to reason with him, that it is an absurd idea—

"_Absurd_? Like insane? Is that what you think I am?"

"I never said that," she softens, and if he weren't so blinded with rage he'd recognize it as genuine. She gets up from her desk and holds out her hands, trying to reach for him but he pulls away. He doesn't want her touch.

"I know who my real mom is," he says, "and I'm going to find her."

"Henry, _I'm_ your mother—"

"No, you're not!"

There are tears running down her face that to him prove crocodile.

"Don't say that," she begs, reaches for him again, but he runs out of the office, leaving her alone. Even when he joins her again under the same damned roof, she'll always be alone.

* * *

Henry is fifteen. He didn't seek out Emma Swan like he said he would. But he will soon, when Regina lets her guard down.

He is growing up and as he does, Regina grows more and more pathetic. She comes to his room with tear stains and open arms, asking for a hug before sleep.

He hates her. He didn't think he did before, but seeing her this way, he really does.

He pities her, however, and realizes that no matter what he does, all he has to do is show her some degree of affection to keep her away. Like a dog satisfied with a treat.

He realizes that he can get away with anything, just as long as he welcomes her when she comes back asking to salvage their relationship. He knows it'll never be fixed. A part of him wants it to be, but he knows, as long as she keeps lying, as long as _this_ keeps happening… they're beyond repair.

* * *

"Henry, I'm about to ask you a very serious question."

"Yeah, Archie?"

"Does your mother hurt you in anyway?"

"What do you mean?"

"Does she, let's say, hit you, when you two fight, which you've been telling me you do often."

"No."

"Henry, I'm about to ask you another serious question."

"What?"

"Do you hit _her_?"

Henry doesn't answer.

* * *

Regina makes a very, very desperate move once he turns 17. She thinks it'll make him love her again, and it'll make the bruises in her heart and her arms go away. What she does is tell him the truth.

But it doesn't do any of that. Instead he laughs without mirth.

"I always knew you were a liar," he says, and Regina excuses herself from the table to go to her room, where she'll likely never leave until the next morning when she goes to work.

* * *

He needs to leave, and to leave fast, because if he doesn't, what he will feel will become real. He has tried to run away from home on multiple occasions, only to be brought back to a Regina that is afraid to touch him. He sees what he's done to her.

All this time he'd been calling her evil. Now he's not so sure she's the only one.

* * *

When he exits Storybrooke to find Emma Swan, it is at Regina's suggestion. He knows what she's thinking. It's not approval, nor is it granting him his freedom. It's a punishment: she thinks he'll be unsuccessful, or that it'll be a scene taken right out of The Bad Mother's Handbook, where Emma is a criminalistic disillusioned and drunken excuse of a woman.

She thinks he'll be wrong in expecting a grand savior, for him and for the town, with the valiance of Prince Charming's spirit and the virtue molding Snow White's heart. That she'd be the complete opposite of who he couldn't bring himself to call mother anymore. That she'd be the answer to all his problems. That she'd break the curse, and everyone, but most of all he, would be free.

He comes to her apartment door, knocks, and when it opens, the dreams he'd held beneath his misery and hate shatters.

She's tired looking, lonely beyond her years, with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a cigarette in another.

"What do you want?" she demands.

"Are you Emma Swan?"

"Yeah, what of it?"

"I'm your son."

Emma scoffs, and it's no mistake that she's his biological mother. She laughs the same way he did when Regina had told him the truth: cruel and sardonic.

"I've got no son, kid. Get lost."

A man's voice from within calls, and Henry goes sick to his stomach.

He goes down the steps of the apartment complex drenched in silent tears. He remembers that Regina had let him use her credit card, and he's not ready to go home yet, whatever he calls it now.

* * *

He comes back to Regina's door nearly a month later. It's when he gets a good look at her after a long period of separation that he notices that she hasn't aged one bit: no wrinkles or lines, save for the bags under her eyes from little sleep and what he assumes is crying.

He hugs her, then, just because he needs to feel something other than hate and anger.

"I told you," she says, and even though it sounds defeated, like she wishes she hadn't been right, it awakens a madness deep inside of Henry, like a lid flicked open with a hammer.

He hears himself say it in his head: "crazy."

* * *

She tries to return to the same way they'd been before he started to hate her, but it falls apart as a pathetic attempt. She cooks for him, touches his arm and tries not to flinch when he moves, and kisses him goodnight.

She tries to be the mother he never thought she was, but he still sees her as nothing but the Evil Queen. She has subjected everyone to the misery that he has endured, but the knowledge is the separator. He's known this ever since he was just a little boy.

One night she drops the act in a moment of honesty. "I'm sorry," she says to him. "I don't know how to break the curse."

One day he might believe her. One day he might believe that she could choose him over the vengeance she has tried so fruitlessly to exact. But that's never going to happen. She's nothing but a monster to him now, not even a human. She sits around in her office trying to hold some semblance of regality and authority with her suits and slacks instead of those wicked and showing queenly attire and she thinks she's doing something with her life for her and for him but she's not. She's pitiful. It makes him sick, and the more he thinks about it the more he'd like to show her how wrong she was, that good will always defeat evil, in the end.

It's a shame to him, because she's as beautiful as Snow White, perhaps more, and if she tried hard enough would be as good and pure. That's the mother he would've wanted. Not this filth. Not the woman who created the filth he was.

She lets down her guard and he makes sure to let her know that it was a mistake to do so.

* * *

Rustling, tears, teeth, and hand prints on skin instead of plaster.

"You did this."

"I'm sorry…."

It is a suitable punishment for the both of them, and the worst part seems to be that she thinks that she deserves it the most.

* * *

He returns to Dr. Hopper's office, eyes bloodshot and unable to keep still. He's done something wrong, horrifying, and he needs it to end and he doesn't know how to make it stop. He doesn't know how to make the sameness disappear, for people to remember him and remember him forever, for Dr. Hopper to realize that he's been seeing him for about his entire life and not just "for a while".

He doesn't know how to be a good son, not an evil son, and he doesn't know how to repair a relationship that was once his whole world in his early youth, how to control the hatred and the darkness in his heart, to touch his mother without hurting her and finding a way to break the curse instead of breaking her.

He doesn't know how to explain that his mother had fallen unconscious last night and is now waking up bruised and with her belly soaked with sin. That even though she is far away from him at this moment, he can hear her screaming into her pillow as loud as her throat permits and wanting as much as he does for everything to end.

If he hears the word, he'll kill someone.

It might even be himself.


End file.
